“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” -Buddha***
We mortals are composed of two great schools--Enlightened knaves or else religious fools.
--Abul 'Ala al Ma'arri (973-1057)***
"Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" -Auntie Mame
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Philosophy, History, Travel, the Arts, Whatever's on my Table...

Thursday, December 04, 2008

Milk

Dar and I watched Gus Van Sant's conjuring of the Castro district of San Francisco in the Seventies today. Having first visited San Francisco in 1976, and every year thereafter until I lived on Russian Hill the summer of 1980, I recall the transformation of Castro into a gay Mecca. I very well may have walked into that camera shop Harvey Milk and friends ran in '76 and '77. My favorite hang out was Cafe Flore, then and now, as well as the out and proud glass corner of the Twin Towers bar. The world we see in the film "Milk" is as authentic as it gets.Harvey_Milk_at_1978_Gay_Freedom_Day.jpg‎ (from Wikipedia)

The uncanny parallel of Prop 6 banning gay teachers, which Milk helped defeat, and the present day Prop 8 which passed despite Obama's stunning win in California is disturbing. But maybe instead of electoral victory, we need to be reminded that in a constitutional democracy that protects the rights of minorities, the court must come to the rescue when there is the tyranny of the majority denying the equality of a minority. The Supreme Court of California established this protection in the case of interracial marriage and so now must do the same, to be just, for same sex marriage.

To return to the wonderful performances of this film, I present the review of the San Francisco Chronicle, the very paper that ultimately endorsed Harvey Milk for supervisor:

(I want to add that more kudos should go to Diego Luna for his heart-rending performance as the doomed lover Jack Lira:{click for a photo of the real Jack Lira}

Before taking on the role of Tenoch in the Mexican blockbuster "Y tu mama tambien", nineteen-year-old Diego Luna was already a soap star his native country. After his mother's death, young Diego yearned to follow his father's footsteps into the entertainment business. A set designer on films, his father Alejando worked on set with director Alfonso Cuaron when Diego was just seven. Though Diego… See Full Diego Luna Biography)

With "Milk," a great San Francisco story becomes a great American story.

Director Gus Van Sant uses the account of one of the country's first openly gay public officials, who was assassinated in 1978, to invest the gay rights movement with mythic grandeur, as a successor to all the heroic social protest movements in American history. Van Sant's point of view may be a matter of politics, outside the scope of a review, but his success in putting over his point of view is a question of art.

His success is complete. His shaping of the material is seamless, and the images he evokes are inspiring.

At the center of everything is Sean Penn, who disappears into the title role. Gone are his familiar facial expressions. Gone are the pursed lips and the covered, compressed quality. He has Harvey Milk's hair, and from some angles - particularly when Milk is in the public arena - the physical resemblance is uncanny. But what's more striking is the spiritual transformation. Penn gives us a man who was once closeted and now, as if in response, lives his life completely in the open. He's spontaneous as Penn has never been spontaneous. He's emotional, vulnerable and generous with his laughter. Penn plays him as an utterly liberated man, and this liberates Penn as an actor.

Milk's openness, which makes him an endearing figure, gives the movie latitude to paint a complex portrait without losing the audience's interest or affection. The Milk who emerges is at times vain and frivolous. His personal life is often messy and sometimes downright farcical, and his Machiavellian streak isn't becoming, even if impressive. He's no saint, but he has courage and self-knowledge, and you get the feeling that both qualities were hard earned. Van Sant's Milk is essentially an average man who gets the call. By chance, by accident of history, by some strange meeting of disposition and location, Harvey Milk, in the 1970s, finds himself to be the one person best suited to lead the gay rights movement.

The movie begins with him in 1978, making a tape recording to be played in the event of his assassination. We then flash back to 1970, when Milk, at 40 years old, decides to throw off his closeted life and move from New York to San Francisco with his new lover, Scott Smith (James Franco).

Van Sant mixes archival footage with new footage - at times, it's impossible to tell one from the other - and it's fascinating to see San Francisco in the '70s. There's color and beauty, but also coarseness; excitement and hope, but with a feeling that something - or everything - just might spin out of control. The depiction looks accurate, but maybe it looks that way only to people, like me, who never saw San Francisco in that era. No matter. Van Sant captures something, either the city as it was or the San Francisco of legend.

By the time he arrives in San Francisco, Milk looks like a hippie, but he's an old hippie with non-hippie talents, such as a gift for organization and a head for business. He buys a camera shop, and soon his store becomes a community hangout. Before anyone else does, Milk realizes the potential clout of the gay community. He becomes the guy people go to when they get beaten up by the police. He becomes the guy the Teamsters talk to when they want the gay community on their side. A generation ago, it apparently wasn't that easy being gay in San Francisco, but Milk realizes the way out of the darkness: He understands that mainstream acceptance will come not through hiding and assimilation but through people being openly and unapologetically themselves.

"Milk" contains a second remarkable performance (unless you also count James Franco's, for looking totally OK about having Sean Penn kissing him like he means it). As Supervisor Dan White, who ultimately murdered Milk and Mayor George Moscone, Josh Brolin presents a chilling study in weakness. White's intelligence is limited. His self-conception is rigid and inaccurate. His anger is unspecific but towering, and he might be gay, though his homosexuality could be hidden even from himself. Brolin lets us see White's thought processes, which are slow and easily derailed by self-protective anger. Last month, Brolin played George W. Bush in "W." This week he's Dan White. He must wonder sometimes what casting directors are reading into him.

Van Sant's goal in "Milk" is to give the gay rights movement the grandness and impact of the civil rights movement. To do that, Milk must be made into the gay equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr., who led a moral crusade, fully knowing that he might be murdered along the way.

In truth, the King comparison only goes so far. Yes, Milk led a crusade that involved physical risk, and the real Harvey Milk did make tapes (in 1977) to be played in the event of his assassination. But it would be stretching things to say Milk was killed because he was gay. His death was more like a fluke, part of a macabre workplace crime that also robbed the city of its mayor. It's evidence of the film's effectiveness, its power to incite emotion, that Milk's death is made to feel like the inevitable consequence of his being a visionary.

One truth "Milk" doesn't need to amplify or manipulate: It's that Harvey Milk's story is part of the San Francisco story, and that story still means something, even to those who came to town years later and never heard of Milk until they got here. Van Sant's images of the candle-lit procession in the aftermath of Milk's death, of the tens of thousands filling Castro Street, are as moving as anything on this year's screen. Those images will mean the same everywhere - that there's something in the American soul that makes people want to come together and that makes progress unstoppable.